Bees

GETAWAY

Finally the chance came.

We felt ourselves tumbling this way and that, our wood hive cracking and splintering. If we wanted to be, we were free.

We looked from fuzzy face to fuzzy face and nodded, terrified but sure. We zoomed away from the broken boxes and the truck. All four thousand of us, the heart chambers of our abdomens thrumming.

The best temporary landing pad was a telephone wire on the street. Shaking from shock and woozy from exertion, we quickly composed ourselves and festooned. We hooked our tiny toes together and created a U-shape from one part of the wire to another, clinging to each other for dear life. We must’ve looked not unlike a long, thick, wiggly beard. It must’ve been a very fine-looking beard.

But we weren’t finished. We had to act fast. We immediately elected a scout — a female worker bee who could go out and search for a suitable new home. We desperately needed a new one now that ours had been shattered and abandoned. But we had no idea where to find a hive or even what it should be. All we could see around us were buildings and streets and people and signs. No more almond orchards.

We chose Bee 641 to be the scout.

Bee 641 had never done any home-finding before, but of course none of the rest of us had either. We’d all been born and raised by benevolent beekeepers who gave us premade wood homes.

But everyone believed mightily in the choice. Because we had to.

Bee 641 stuck out her antennae, legs dangling limply beneath her, all four of her wings alighting from our bee beard. The shops and traffic signs glistened in the thousands of black lenses of her eyes.

She wandered, hoping to find the hollow of a tree, but she had no such good fortune. For our colony of bees, home meant either a box on a truck or the hollow of a tree. That’s all we’d ever known — the first from experience, and the second from stories the queen told at bedtime.

Our family — all four thousand of us — was depending on Bee 641.

So off she flew. When she smelled something sweet, she followed. She saw a glint of green on top of a nestlike mass.

Maybe those are leaves, she thought, a kind of leaves I’ve not seen before. Leaves and twigs and silt. It’s not a tree, and it appears to be moving, but it’s something.

OK, it was a stretch. But these were stretching times.

Bee 641 immediately returned to the telephone wire. Our colony took no time querying about the location of the new digs. We unlinked our toes, giving them a kick to unfurl, and we were off.

Bee 641 led the way, and we followed.

There, there! she signaled to our gang behind her.

We flew toward what resembled a shrub atop a torso and legs. We landed, one by one, and quickly configured into the shape of a proper hive. The opposite of a long, thick, wiggly beard. More like a high, wiggly clump.

But as soon as we’d caught our little breaths and assessed our surroundings, we set about accusing Bee 641 of being completely and utterly unreliable.

Leaves? Twigs? we raged. We beg to differ.

Poor Bee 641’s mandible quivered.

How do you expect us to live here? Where will we put the honeycomb? The young? How will we survive?

But we already had our answer. We were stuck. Again. This time on top of a human’s head with copious amounts of hair thinly coated with sugar.

We may have been naive — OK, we were naive — but we truly thought we had nowhere else to go and no other options. We looked around, considering our situation. All we could do was shake our heads at Bee 641.